arXiv subjects

Michael Ying Yang

Publications and source records attributed to Michael Ying Yang.

83 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

arXiv2018

Temporally Object-based Video Co-Segmentation

In this paper, we propose an unsupervised video object co-segmentation framework based on the primary object proposals to extract the common foreground object(s) from a given video set. In addition to the objectness attributes and motion coherence our framework exploits the temporal consistency of the object-like regions between adjacent frames to enrich the set of original object proposals. We call the enriched proposal sets temporal proposal streams, as they are composed of the most similar proposals from each frame augmented with predicted proposals using temporally consistent superpixel information. The temporal proposal streams represent all the possible region tubes of the objects. Therefore, we formulate a graphical model to select a proposal stream for each object in which the pairwise potentials consist of the appearance dissimilarity between different streams in the same video and also the similarity between the streams in different videos. This model is suitable for single (multiple) foreground objects in two (more) videos, which can be solved by any existing energy minimization method. We evaluate our proposed framework by comparing it to other video co-segmentation algorithms. Our method achieves improved performance on state-of-the-art benchmark datasets.

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arXiv2017

Natural Language Guided Visual Relationship Detection

Reasoning about the relationships between object pairs in images is a crucial task for holistic scene understanding. Most of the existing works treat this task as a pure visual classification task: each type of relationship or phrase is classified as a relation category based on the extracted visual features. However, each kind of relationships has a wide variety of object combination and each pair of objects has diverse interactions. Obtaining sufficient training samples for all possible relationship categories is difficult and expensive. In this work, we propose a natural language guided framework to tackle this problem. We propose to use a generic bi-directional recurrent neural network to predict the semantic connection between the participating objects in the relationship from the aspect of natural language. The proposed simple method achieves the state-of-the-art on the Visual Relationship Detection (VRD) and Visual Genome datasets, especially when predicting unseen relationships (e.g. recall improved from 76.42% to 89.79% on VRD zero-shot testing set).

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arXiv2017

Deep Learning for Vanishing Point Detection Using an Inverse Gnomonic Projection

We present a novel approach for vanishing point detection from uncalibrated monocular images. In contrast to state-of-the-art, we make no a priori assumptions about the observed scene. Our method is based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) which does not use natural images, but a Gaussian sphere representation arising from an inverse gnomonic projection of lines detected in an image. This allows us to rely on synthetic data for training, eliminating the need for labelled images. Our method achieves competitive performance on three horizon estimation benchmark datasets. We further highlight some additional use cases for which our vanishing point detection algorithm can be used.

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arXiv2017

On Support Relations and Semantic Scene Graphs

Scene understanding is a popular and challenging topic in both computer vision and photogrammetry. Scene graph provides rich information for such scene understanding. This paper presents a novel approach to infer such relations and then to construct the scene graph. Support relations are estimated by considering important, previously ignored information: the physical stability and the prior support knowledge between object classes. In contrast to previous methods for extracting support relations, the proposed approach generates more accurate results, and does not require a pixel-wise semantic labeling of the scene. The semantic scene graph which describes all the contextual relations within the scene is constructed using this information. To evaluate the accuracy of these graphs, multiple different measures are formulated. The proposed algorithms are evaluated using the NYUv2 database. The results demonstrate that the inferred support relations are more precise than state-of-the-art. The scene graphs are compared against ground truth graphs.

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arXiv2017

Towards Automated Cadastral Boundary Delineation from UAV Data

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) are evolving as an alternative tool to acquire land tenure data. UAVs can capture geospatial data at high quality and resolution in a cost-effective, transparent and flexible manner, from which visible land parcel boundaries, i.e., cadastral boundaries are delineable. This delineation is to no extent automated, even though physical objects automatically retrievable through image analysis methods mark a large portion of cadastral boundaries. This study proposes (i) a workflow that automatically extracts candidate cadastral boundaries from UAV orthoimages and (ii) a tool for their semi-automatic processing to delineate final cadastral boundaries. The workflow consists of two state-of-the-art computer vision methods, namely gPb contour detection and SLIC superpixels that are transferred to remote sensing in this study. The tool combines the two methods, allows a semi-automatic final delineation and is implemented as a publicly available QGIS plugin. The approach does not yet aim to provide a comparable alternative to manual cadastral mapping procedures. However, the methodological development of the tool towards this goal is developed in this paper. A study with 13 volunteers investigates the design and implementation of the approach and gathers initial qualitative as well as quantitate results. The study revealed points for improvement, which are prioritized based on the study results and which will be addressed in future work.

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arXiv2017

Analyzing Modular CNN Architectures for Joint Depth Prediction and Semantic Segmentation

This paper addresses the task of designing a modular neural network architecture that jointly solves different tasks. As an example we use the tasks of depth estimation and semantic segmentation given a single RGB image. The main focus of this work is to analyze the cross-modality influence between depth and semantic prediction maps on their joint refinement. While most previous works solely focus on measuring improvements in accuracy, we propose a way to quantify the cross-modality influence. We show that there is a relationship between final accuracy and cross-modality influence, although not a simple linear one. Hence a larger cross-modality influence does not necessarily translate into an improved accuracy. We find that a beneficial balance between the cross-modality influences can be achieved by network architecture and conjecture that this relationship can be utilized to understand different network design choices. Towards this end we propose a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture that fuses the state of the state-of-the-art results for depth estimation and semantic labeling. By balancing the cross-modality influences between depth and semantic prediction, we achieve improved results for both tasks using the NYU-Depth v2 benchmark.

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arXiv2017

Motion Segmentation via Global and Local Sparse Subspace Optimization

In this paper, we propose a new framework for segmenting feature-based moving objects under affine subspace model. Since the feature trajectories in practice are high-dimensional and contain a lot of noise, we firstly apply the sparse PCA to represent the original trajectories with a low-dimensional global subspace, which consists of the orthogonal sparse principal vectors. Subsequently, the local subspace separation will be achieved via automatically searching the sparse representation of the nearest neighbors for each projected data. In order to refine the local subspace estimation result and deal with the missing data problem, we propose an error estimation to encourage the projected data that span a same local subspace to be clustered together. In the end, the segmentation of different motions is achieved through the spectral clustering on an affinity matrix, which is constructed with both the error estimation and sparse neighbors optimization. We test our method extensively and compare it with state-of-the-art methods on the Hopkins 155 dataset and Freiburg-Berkeley Motion Segmentation dataset. The results show that our method is comparable with the other motion segmentation methods, and in many cases exceed them in terms of precision and computation time.

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arXiv2016

Can Ground Truth Label Propagation from Video help Semantic Segmentation?

For state-of-the-art semantic segmentation task, training convolutional neural networks (CNNs) requires dense pixelwise ground truth (GT) labeling, which is expensive and involves extensive human effort. In this work, we study the possibility of using auxiliary ground truth, so-called \textit{pseudo ground truth} (PGT) to improve the performance. The PGT is obtained by propagating the labels of a GT frame to its subsequent frames in the video using a simple CRF-based, cue integration framework. Our main contribution is to demonstrate the use of noisy PGT along with GT to improve the performance of a CNN. We perform a systematic analysis to find the right kind of PGT that needs to be added along with the GT for training a CNN. In this regard, we explore three aspects of PGT which influence the learning of a CNN: i) the PGT labeling has to be of good quality; ii) the PGT images have to be different compared to the GT images; iii) the PGT has to be trusted differently than GT. We conclude that PGT which is diverse from GT images and has good quality of labeling can indeed help improve the performance of a CNN. Also, when PGT is multiple folds larger than GT, weighing down the trust on PGT helps in improving the accuracy. Finally, We show that using PGT along with GT, the performance of Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) on Camvid data is increased by $2.7\%$ on IoU accuracy. We believe such an approach can be used to train CNNs for semantic video segmentation where sequentially labeled image frames are needed. To this end, we provide recommendations for using PGT strategically for semantic segmentation and hence bypass the need for extensive human efforts in labeling.

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arXiv2016

Real-Time RGB-D based Template Matching Pedestrian Detection

Pedestrian detection is one of the most popular topics in computer vision and robotics. Considering challenging issues in multiple pedestrian detection, we present a real-time depth-based template matching people detector. In this paper, we propose different approaches for training the depth-based template. We train multiple templates for handling issues due to various upper-body orientations of the pedestrians and different levels of detail in depth-map of the pedestrians with various distances from the camera. And, we take into account the degree of reliability for different regions of sliding window by proposing the weighted template approach. Furthermore, we combine the depth-detector with an appearance based detector as a verifier to take advantage of the appearance cues for dealing with the limitations of depth data. We evaluate our method on the challenging ETH dataset sequence. We show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches.

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arXiv2015

Automatic 3D Liver Segmentation Using Sparse Representation of Global and Local Image Information via Level Set Formulation

In this paper, a novel framework for automated liver segmentation via a level set formulation is presented. A sparse representation of both global (region-based) and local (voxel-wise) image information is embedded in a level set formulation to innovate a new cost function. Two dictionaries are build: A region-based feature dictionary and a voxel-wise dictionary. These dictionaries are learned, using the K-SVD method, from a public database of liver segmentation challenge (MICCAI-SLiver07). The learned dictionaries provide prior knowledge to the level set formulation. For the quantitative evaluation, the proposed method is evaluated using the testing data of MICCAI-SLiver07 database. The results are evaluated using different metric scores computed by the challenge organizers. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed framework by achieving the highest segmentation accuracy (79.6\%) in comparison to the state-of-the-art methods.

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arXiv2015

Learning Analysis-by-Synthesis for 6D Pose Estimation in RGB-D Images

Analysis-by-synthesis has been a successful approach for many tasks in computer vision, such as 6D pose estimation of an object in an RGB-D image which is the topic of this work. The idea is to compare the observation with the output of a forward process, such as a rendered image of the object of interest in a particular pose. Due to occlusion or complicated sensor noise, it can be difficult to perform this comparison in a meaningful way. We propose an approach that "learns to compare", while taking these difficulties into account. This is done by describing the posterior density of a particular object pose with a convolutional neural network (CNN) that compares an observed and rendered image. The network is trained with the maximum likelihood paradigm. We observe empirically that the CNN does not specialize to the geometry or appearance of specific objects, and it can be used with objects of vastly different shapes and appearances, and in different backgrounds. Compared to state-of-the-art, we demonstrate a significant improvement on two different datasets which include a total of eleven objects, cluttered background, and heavy occlusion.

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